What is pop doing today? It fills our heads; sometimes it lifts us up. It invents sparingly, it plunders a little, it copies a lot.

It still accompanies us; it also torments us. It exhilarates us from time to time; it often diminishes us.

But what it hardly does anymore is make us dream - truly dream, with our eyes open as well as closed.

That is precisely where Dorian Pimpernel returns with a second album. The five members - the drummer fascinated by Antiquity, the part-time philosopher-songwriter, the polymorphous filmmaker-composer, the bassist-archivist possessed by records, the singer long secluded with his guitar - have not changed in nature.

But their music has mutated. Denser. More coherent. More inhabited. Still operating on the margins of the classic "group of friends starting a band" model, they pursue their strange project: moonshine pop - the nocturnal, lunatic, sometimes venomous reverse side of Californian sunshine pop.

Except that here, the concept is no longer an aesthetic hypothesis - it is a territory.

A world built brick by brick, record by record, where every sound, every timbre, every intention has its place, like in a secret architecture.

Their influences are still present, but more deeply digested: the learned psychedelia of the '60s, the imagined bridges between Canterbury and Düsseldorf, haunted film scores, rare synthesizers and vintage guitars that populate their studio-cabinet of curiosities.

Except that here, none of it is quoted anymore - it breathes. It lives. It acts. In depth, it is strictly contemporary: ambiguous, shimmering, unstable, vibrant.

But also - and above all - harmonious, immediate, deliciously toxic, of an almost suspect beauty.

The real surprise is that this second album already possesses the density of a mature work.

In its themes - lost illusions, roads leading nowhere, parallel worlds brushed against but never inhabited - as in its form: no longer merely a proposition, but a fully realized manifesto.

The dream machine has been restarted. And this time, it runs without an instruction manual.